AP lawsuit threatens the Net
p2pnet news | Freedom:- Wire service Associated Press is attacking Verisign in case which literally threatens the integrity of the Net.
It’s suing Verisign’s news aggregation site, Moreover, because of alleged unlicensed use of AP news stories.
AP sent a cease-and-desist letter to Moreover in September, “asking it to stop including AP content in its services because Moreover does not license the content,” says the IDG News Service, going on:
“Moreover has failed to comply, so now the AP seeks damages and a permanent injunction against the companies.”
According to Rich Ord on WebPro News, the lawsuit claims:
You can’t use headlines of articles without permission from copyright holders.
You can’t use leads or short snippets of articles without permission from copyright holders.
You can’t run a business that sorts data available to anyone on the Internet like news aggregation sites do.
You can’t use marketing statements like “hot news” if you link to groups of AP articles.
Basically, you can’t run a news aggregation business that includes links to AP stories because that competes with AP’s paid syndication model, according to AP.
Associated Press says it’s the, “backbone of the world’s information system serving thousands of daily newspaper, radio, television and online customers with coverage in all media and news in all formats”.
This will be of great interest to Canadian Wayne Crookes who’s currently doing his best to stop the Net from doing what it does.
He claims linking to story which offends him amounts to defamation and is suing Google, Wikimedia, Pbwiki, Yahoo, MySpace, Openpolitics.ca, Domains by Proxy, Michael Pilling, Hayley Easton, Kate Holloway, Craig Hubley, Frank Cameron, Catharine Johannson, Gareth White, Michael Geist, p2pnet, and other unnamed people.
“In Canada, Crookes has achieved a virtual media freeze, on and offline,” said p2pnet.
“Afraid of being added to his list of victims, print and electronic publications are conspicuous because they’re carefully avoiding mention of the case which is, of course, exactly what Crookes wants.”
Now, “Unfortunately, an AP win here could ultimately subject the entire concept of linking on the Internet to a new legal standard, especially links to news stories and blog posts,” Ord posts , going on:
If fair use becomes “permission linking” then much of the Internet could be challenged.
The AP seems to think it has a monopoly on high quality content. A legal standard based on this case would mean all linking is subject to approval by the party being linked to.
Defiitely stay tuned.
Also See:
IDG News Service – AP sues VeriSign’s Moreover news aggregator, October 10, 2007
WebPro News – AP Suing Moreover Like It’s 1999, October 10, 2007
doing what it does – Google sued for online defamation, June 29, 2007
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October 16th, 2007 at 12:11 am
Protest! If you link to an AP story anywhere, either spell out the link so the user must paste it and it loses search ranks, or use rel=nofollow in your A tags to punish the AP stories you link to.